Fans can expect Israeli flags to be confiscated if they attempt to fly them at Wembley. Photo: ProSports/Shutterstock/Graham Hunt
So that's how it ends. After the Wembley Arch turned red for Turkey, blue and yellow for Ukraine and every color of the rainbow for the One Love armband, the Football Association decided it could not approve any light show for Israel.
< p>For a decade, the national game donned the mantle of virtue, hitching its wagon to every fashionable cause. Laces for LGBT+ right to take a knee for Black Lives Matter: whatever, the FA backed it. But now, faced with the worst geopolitical crisis in a generation, the governing body has found the one topic it dare not touch.
It's a cop-out that's as exciting as it is predictable. At this point the FA feels that it is too difficult to choose a side and that it wants to present itself as apolitical. So what have the last few years been about? How do you explain the endless kneeling or symbolic activism for gay rights in Qatar?
Either the FA is aware of its role as a politically active organization or it is not. It cannot, like Israel, shrouded in darkness, rely on the old idea that sports should be kept separate from politics for fear of offending certain communities. Otherwise, it might look a lot like cowardice.
Now we know: there will be no blue and white colors at Wembley on Friday night to honor Israel, even though the country's flag can be seen projected above the door to 10 Downing Street. The FA's calculations, contrary to strict government advice, are that the risk of retaliation is too serious to even contemplate.
How spineless. How completely helpless. In a brief, banal statement that took almost a week to publish, the FA couldn't even bring itself to call Hamas's atrocities attacks, instead referring to the «ongoing conflict.» Did you think that the BBC was cowardly, preferring to call “militants” terrorists?
When it comes to fearful language, football has a special place. The Prince of Wales, President of the FA, may call Hamas terrorism what it is, but that is not what the organization is capable of.
The sheer inconsistency is also enough to make you scream. It would be shorter to list the worthy causes and deaths that have not inspired the lighting of the Wembley Arch in recent times rather than those that have. Who could forget yellow and green for Pele? For better or worse, the giant structure has become a national billboard for bleeding hearts.
Rarely have the FA, the stadium's custodians, put on these light displays more readily than in the wake of terrorist attacks. It is in such moments of universal savagery that it feels obliged to declare in the strongest possible terms its mantra “we stand for humanity.” In December 2016, 24 hours after the Istanbul bombings killed 48 people, the arch issued a red message of solidarity with Turkey. Nine months ago, in response to the deaths of 31 people in Brussels, it lit up in the hues of the Belgian flag. And just a few weeks earlier, after a massacre in Paris that ended with the death of 130 people, the French tricolor flared into the London night.
There is nothing for Israel. The FA have not explained why as there is no point in trying to justify the unforgivable. The not-so-subtle explanation, of course, is that it is afraid of stoking divisions at a hectic time. However, you wonder where the line is drawn. He quickly expressed his disgust at the 90 people shot dead by Islamist terrorists at the Bataclan theater in Paris in 2015. ?
Lord Mann, the government's antisemitism adviser, offers a straightforward answer. «The idea is that in terms of football, Jews don't count,» he told Telegraph Sport, expressing the thoughts of Jewish fans who contacted him. It's hard to imagine a more convincing verdict on where the game ended up after six days of hesitation and prevarication. It's no surprise that David Bernstein, the FA's chief executive from 2011 to 2013, says he is «resentful».
The pain is that the place where he once held power has abandoned him and countless his fellow Jews with a feeling of devaluation.
The supposed decision for the friendly against Australia doesn't even make sense. If the purpose of turning off the lights is to prevent a Hamas uprising, a minute of silence seems the least sensible option.
This silence is easily exploited in football. Even those that took place a week after the queen's death were not universally respected. And for whose sake and for what does the crowd fall silent? Are these really the poor souls slaughtered by medieval barbarity at a concert? Or, to use the FA's banal formulation, it is simply a call to «end death, violence, fear and suffering.»
It is noteworthy that this is not the worst of plans. The FA's cunning ploy, «following discussions with external stakeholders», is that only expressions of English or Australian nationality will be permitted at Wembley.
One gets the impression, to put it mildly, that it hasn't really thought this through. Can you imagine how this would happen if a fan who has family in Israel, perhaps a relative who participated in the bloodshed, wanted to fly an Israeli flag and promptly confiscated it? How will this affect the host country's image as a loyal ally of Israel? You feel for the stewards who have to enforce such a rule.
The FA clearly wants to be the great unifier. But the way football approaches this lofty goal can be hopelessly naive. “We are proud to support the cause of Black Lives Matter,” the FA said in June 2020. “Those three words became an expression of unity.”
Well, not quite. If they had bothered to look beyond gesture politics, they would have realized that there are other keywords associated with the BLM movement. For example, defund the police. And now the Chicago chapter of BLM has said it «stands with Palestine» by posting an image online of a paratrooper following a Hamas attack on Israel.
In the midst of an ideological crusade in football, any doubt about BLM's promotion would invite accusations of fanaticism. But when you see the terrible mess the game has created over Israel, you realize it's right to be skeptical.
Ultimately, football likes to be political, specializing in the politics of convenience. No commitment to a cause is too cosmetic or self-serving if it ultimately results in image polishing.
Take Jordan Henderson: one day he's accepting awards as a gay ally, the next day he's promoting a World Cup bid for a Saudi regime that criminalizes homosexuality. It is this depth of conviction that has become the standard.
“We will continue to take a strong stand against all forms of discrimination,” the FA promised three years ago. Today, that promise is a little outdated. Faced with the worst discrimination and abhorrent brutality unleashed by Hamas against Israel, English football had nothing convincing to say.
That's all about the fight against all forms of injustice. When it comes to injustice, it seems that a strange exception can be made.
Such a position is difficult to forget — and even more so to forgive.
Свежие комментарии